One of the most successful aspects of writing this newsletter is:
Learning entrepreneurship skills the right way.
What I mean is, I (and you) get to learn from real-life cases.
All the research I do for this newsletter feels like supercharging my brain. Think of the business cases handed out in Business schools and multiply that by 1000x.
Look…
I believe you won’t learn as much from articles like “10 things you must do to optimize your content for SEO.” Have they tried these tactics? Or are they just repeating what others said?
I prefer to take advice from people like me, indiepreneurs who have tried these tactics.
Perceptual Learning
Two things separate experts from everyone else:
- They practiced better.
- They were exposed to many high-quality examples of people doing the right things.
This is called perceptual learning. (There you go, you learned a new concept.)
As a maker, you want to gain perceptual knowledge from successful cases to develop your entrepreneurial intuition. You want to train your unconscious mind to make the good business decisions for you.
Today, I want to help you gain perceptual knowledge about SEO. To do that, I’m going to share the best tips I found from digital indie makers who have used these strategies to rank high on Google and turn it into an automated sales machine.
Tip #1: Do SEO from Day One
Jonny White built Ticket Tailor and grew it to $5 million in yearly ticket sales. He says, “It’s worth investing in SEO from day one and trying to secure a top spot in Google for a key search term or two.” They claimed some top spots through a combination of PR, links on relevant directory sites, and relevant content, contributing to their growth for years.
Tip #2: Write a Lot of Content
The best way to attract new customers organically via SEO is by publishing a lot of content. SelfDecode, a genetic analysis SaaS built by Joe Cohen, earns $200K and gets 500K page views per month. They have hundreds of health-related articles on several subdomains, bringing about half a million users to their website each month.
Tip #3: Constantly Update and Improve Your Content
ScreenshotOne reached $8k MRR in June, two years after launching. Its founder, Dmytro Krasun, attracts customers mainly via SEO by writing SEO-optimized content on his blog. He advises, “Don’t forget to review your old content, update it, and improve titles to get better CTRs and eventually higher positions.” He exports CSV files from Google Search Console, does some research, and improves titles based on his ideal customer profile, search intents, and their funnel stage.
Tip #4: Write Helpful Content
Your #1 priority is helping your customers. Adam Hoeksema, co-founder and CEO of ProjectionHub, grew revenue to $310K/year by helping startups and small businesses create financial projections. Their primary organic traffic strategy has been producing helpful content for entrepreneurs needing financial projections. “I decided I would just write more about financial projections than anyone else in the world, and over the next several years I wrote hundreds of blog posts, and over time, it worked!”
Tip #5: Be Patient
Getting ranked on Google takes time. Philip Baretto grew Tiiny Host to $6K MRR in 33 months once he realized that “SEO was the best growth strategy for the tool.” He created content to target specific keywords and published it. But it took Google at least six months to start ranking the content, which is when they began experiencing organic sign-ups. So, expect this strategy to take some time.
Tip #6: Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
Japan Dev is a niche job board site specializing in tech positions in Japan, created by Eric Turner. This bootstrapped business with no employees makes $60K MRR. The team invested a lot of time to optimize their website for search engines, “targeting relevant keywords and ensuring that my content was well-structured and engaging.” They achieved this by creating separate pages for long-tail keywords and structured JSON for job posts to improve search engine visibility.
Tip #7: Keep an Eye on How Your Brand is Performing
Robert Brandl from Tooltester.com makes $1.4M per year with SEO by helping freelancers and small businesses create websites. He says that brand searches have a very positive influence on your Google rankings. When checking this information in Google Search Console, watch out for variations of your company name. For example, in their case, people search for both ’email tool tester’ and ’emailtooltester.’
Tip #8: Build Referrals
Vol Zastavny, founder of MySignature, makes $700K per year by helping solopreneurs, small, and medium businesses create customized branded signatures. They built relevant backlinks through referrals. Vol mentions that “gives us the opportunity to get additional backlinks, and on another one, also traffic that converts.” They also actively analyze resources that bring them traffic and paid customers to build relationships and partnerships with those and similar resources.
Tip #9: Add SERP Features for an Extra Boost
Holger Sindbaek is the developer of Online Solitaire, which makes $10K per month. He spends most of his days trying to rank better on Google. One of his key SEO tactics is to implement as many SERP features as possible. “Adding SERP features is a smart way to get boosted to the top of Google for certain search terms and to draw more attention to your site in search results. Going through the different SERP features and implementing whichever makes sense for your site is an easy win.”
Tip #10: Ask for Help
Sylvestre Dupont and Sylvain Josserand are the founders of Parseur, a data extraction tool that makes over $40K of revenue per month. SEO became their sole customer acquisition avenue. They realized it is not always easy to find the motivation to publish new content and write SEO-friendly articles, especially with a technical background. That’s why they hired an SEO freelancer for $100/month to help them with SEO. By the end of the first year’s efforts, they reached 30,000 monthly sessions, proving their viability.
If you want to make Google work for you, always be selling and bringing traffic to your website, then SEO is for you.
Which option will you implement?
